


The Grey Plague

by joannabelle



Category: The Silmarillion and other histories of Middle-Earth - J. R. R. Tolkien
Genre: Crack, Fluff, Hallucinations, Hurt/Comfort, Just fire me, M/M, Overdramatic Sauron, Poor emotional communication skills, Questionable characterisation, Relationship Issues, To An Extent, Whinging
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-20
Updated: 2015-06-20
Packaged: 2018-04-05 06:06:21
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,992
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4168824
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/joannabelle/pseuds/joannabelle
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sauron makes for one hell of a terrible patient.  It’s a good thing Ainur cannot actually become diseased – now let’s take that fact, and throw it out the window. </p><p>Angbang crack, with an added side of hurt/comfort and relationship issues – all the “finest” drama Angband has to offer.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Grey Plague

**Author's Note:**

> Disclaimer: I do not own these characters.  
> Rating: Mature, to be safe  
> Warnings: Abject whinging, and some seriously questionable characterisation.  
> Notes: This is hogswash, and you are probably going to regret reading it.

* * *

  


“I am _dying_.” Sauron announced, with a cough, over the sound of the burly mumbling that was permeating the room.  
  
The War Room meeting was in full swing. After a raucous argument between Gothmog and Bolg had ended in tears and an update to their advancement tactics, the Generals were huddled in a squash around the meeting table above a series of crumpled parchment maps.  
  
Gothmog was still pointing vehemently to an area depicting the East Sea, his finger tapping further dents into the paper, when Sauron again broke the mood.  
  
“Someone fetch me a glass of water.” He called from the back end of the table.   
  
When no one moved to respond, the Maia began to click his fingers in impatient distaste: “What is this service, Gothmog?” He griped. “Your servants are almost as slow to respond as your defence lines.”  
  
In truth, half the servants in the room were his – but no one was moving and this did not support his point, so he left that detail out.  
  
From across the table, Gothmog looked up and growled.  
  
“Maybe it’s because, like the rest of us, they too are sick of listening to your whining, Sauron.” The Balrog glared, emphasising Sauron’s name as one would spit out a clot of blood.  
  
“Whining!” Sauron was outraged. His hand flailed as he slouched back in his seat, in which he had resided from the majority of the meeting and contributed equally little. “I fear I’ve caught the Grey Elf Plague! … _Whining_.”  
  
He coughed again, and felt rather satisfied with the distinct stickiness of the sound.   
  
Clearly, his lungs were filling and filling fast.  He wondered whether his hröa would make it through the night.  
  
With a glare of irritation, Gothmog turned back to the proceedings, and a surly Orc servant dropped a half-spilt mug of water upon the table at Sauron’s front – just out of reach. He was forced to stretch his arm forward to take a sip.  
  
Glancing up in annoyance, Sauron caught Melkor sending him an unimpressed expression from atop the throne, and he felt his face redden.  
  
Despite all their mockery, he was actually feeling quite unwell.  
  
‘Ainur cannot catch the Plague.’ They said.  
  
‘Stop exaggerating.’ They said.  
  
Well, he would show them. When he _died in his sleep_.  
  
‘ _And then they’ll see_ ,’ Sauron thought darkly. ‘ _They’ll all see_.’  
  
Although, the repercussions of this fate were not ideal; as he was in no particular hurry to find his fëa face-to-face once again with the scornful looks of the Valar. No, this was a confrontation he was rather content with putting off – for at least another age or two. Give or take a thousand years.  
  
Sauron sneezed, and felt a stab of pain wrack through his chest.  
  
Ah, but there was no denying it – his hröa was beginning to crumble, right here in his seat. He needed to get his affairs in order.  
  
“Gentlemen,” Sauron stood – wobbling a little, in part because his foot got caught underneath the leg of his seat, and in part because it did a fairly good job at emphasizing his announcement: “… Orcs,” he added, with a side-eyed nod at his audience, noting with the poke of a sly grin that at least half of the faces turned towards him dropped at his addition, and that Melkor had shifted in what looked like amusement from the throne:  
  
“I fear that it is time I must depart.” He declared, with a voice of scratchy ail. “Though it is with great distaste that I leave you here without the guide of my ever valuable council. In grave times difficult decisions must be made – and I have faith in your proceedings despite my absence.”  
  
“But, as I fear I have caught some foul and terrible illness,” Sauron continued, and added a strangled cough to his words for good measure, “This vile _plague_ upon my hröa which has questioned the strength of my fëa and greatness alike – for your own health and safety I must turn from you now and leave you to this meeting in my stead.”  
  
“Praise Eru.” Someone bit.  
  
But Sauron continued: “Yet I ask … upon its completion, that notes be brought henceforth to my chambers. Where, upon my unlikely survival, I might bring myself back up-to-date.”  
  
The room glowered. Sauron noted with vague registration that Gothmog looked about ready to administer a punch.  He hoped it was not for him; he was not really feeling up for a fight.  
  
With an air of malaise, Sauron shuffled out from behind the table and twirled in a swish of amber hair towards the doors.  
  
“No shorthand.” He added, glancing pointedly back over his shoulder at an unimpressed Balgir, whom quickly hid an offending finger the Orc had been pointing rudely behind his back.  
  
“Don’t stress yourself on the journey back to your rooms.” Melkor droned with snide remark from his throne, as the Vala flicked an uninterested hand in Sauron’s direction.  
  
Sauron sniffed, and took his leave with a huff.  
  


* * *

  
Five hours later, his condition had not improved.  
  
In fact, as hard as it was to believe – it had _worsened_.  
  
From where his throat had before felt scratchy against his speech, it now chafed with every motion, making it nearly impossible for Sauron to swallow anything but wine.  
  
He moaned, rolling helplessly over in his double-king, silk-covered bed.  “I’m dying.” He reasserted – but no one was there to hear him.  
  
Dropping his face into his extra-fluffed pillows, Sauron sighed, drifting back into a daze.  
  
He felt sticky, and sick, and very, very much alone.  
  


* * *

  
The next time he awoke, however, the ground was ash – and the walls were flame.  
  
Sauron sat up, squinting, as a feeling of disorientation staggered through him.  
  
He was not, in truth now, entirely sure where he was.  
  
“Mairon, thank Eru.” A voice burnt from behind the licking of the flame – one of wooden, ashen pine. It felt strange … familiar even.  
  
And with a widening of his eyes, Mairon whipped around his head.  The scenery streaked past him in a smudge of red orange tar, far too fast for the slow slosh that was his mind.   
  
But there: carved into the dark corner by the door stood the burly, brusque figure of his Master.  
  
But it was not …it was not … He was not sure. For surely something here was awry, but Sauron could not pinpoint what it was – and the flames were beginning to singe at the corners of his clothes.  
  
“Aulë?” He uttered in confusion, though the words came out more a slur – and Mairon fought himself in a battle to sit further upright.  The sheets seemed to struggle with him in a sticky web of sodden silk, as though they intended to bind him back upon the bed.   
  
“What is it?” Sauron continued in his confusion, and the question hung dumb upon the air.  
  
Aulë stared at him. His Master’s face seemed carved as though of stone, and his features sat unnervingly blank.   
  
Mairon struggled further, pushing himself into a seated type of hunch upon the bed, as his arms trembled heavily with the effort of keeping himself upright.   
  
Something was … something was wrong …  
  
“Have I forgotten something, Master?” He queried.  Sauron tried in a vein, sluggish reflex to gaze around the room and find what he has missed. The walls of flame crackled hot against his ears, and from somewhere seemingly ever so far away, he thought he could make out the faint rasp of frantic, laboured breaths.  
  
The Vala again did not reply, so Sauron twisted his head past the shape of the figure and looked and looked and looked.   
  
There was something strange, as a twisting claw of nausea peeled up the steps of his vertebrae and came to rest at the base of his tightened, clenching throat.   
  
Across from the end of his bed were lined an array of pewter shelves.  The metal was dented as though worn with age – yet Sauron had never noticed them before.  Through blurry vision he could see that they were adorned with a line of old trinkets – silvery vases, engraved knives, and a golden box in which he stored his hammer between jobs.  
  
Across the objects, strewn, was a flutter of white flakes that melted like snow into the metal. On closer inspection – as he stretched forth on his shaking hands and clenched his eyes shut, until the blur of slime had cleared – Sauron saw that they were the thin, separated remains of bindweed petals. Yavanna must have scattered some upon his work before she left.  
  
“Mairon.” The voice again spoke, and it was thick like honey to his ears. Sauron felt his head scratch over the sound. “ _How could you do this_?”  
  
He could not reply.  
  
There was a rattling sound that seemed to vibrate from inside his own stomach.  
  
“Don’t you hear the birds?” The wooden voice continued – and he could not make out Aulë’s lips move from over the slide of that hot, _pervasive_ flame.  
  
“They are coming for you.” The voice wrung, and there was the flutter of what sounded like heavy, gilded wings.  
  
Sauron braced himself for the impact – but the rush gusted past his cheeks like wind, and instead swirled around him in a bright hot burning cloud of fire.  
  
He choked.   
  
With a strangled gasp and a pain that wracked down his entire throat, Sauron wrenched himself upright and tore the sheets up from the bed.  
  


* * *

  
Three days later found Sauron sat, begrudgingly, inside the wings of the Angband infirmary, a cool cloth upon his forehead.  
  
He had a fever, they said, as though this was something he had not already figured out.  
  
He had not told the healers about the dreams, but had frowned at their utter lack of worry that he was, in fact, still _dying._  
  


* * *

__  
“No!” Sauron bit, throwing his empty goblet and letting it clang to the floor a foot short of the wall. “I said tepid wine, not ** _warm_**!”  
  
“How hard is this to get right?” Sauron bitched, as the tending Orc scurried to fetch the glass from the floor, her hands shaking.  
  
“ _Tepid_!” Sauron shouted again, just to watch her jump.  Unfortunately, this exclamation seemed to prove just simply one too much – as in that moment his voice died, and the Maia was left speechless for an hour.  
  


* * *

  
“You do not understand.” Sauron argued, after a further day.  “I _am_ dying. My fëa has already begun to reconnect with the Valar.”  
  
“You’re not dying, my Lord, you simply need to lay off the wine and get a bit more rest.” The healer assured him, as he tried to shift the whining Maia out of the main infirmary and back to his personal halls.  
  
They were receiving complaints from some of the other patients – not that the Orc dared mention this to the Lieutenant.  
  
“No one has so much as come to pay their respects.” The Maia bitched, but marched off anyway.  
  
The healer gave a tired sigh of relief.  
  


* * *

  
His meeting notes turned up, albeit a week late.  
  
Mairon glowered at the shorthand, clearly etched in Balgir’s crass chicken scratch.  
  
If he survived, he was going to have to give these Orcs a lesson in dictation.  
  


* * *

  
A further four days later saw the first instance someone other than himself opened Sauron’s chamber doors.  
  
“They are doing some renovation in the Throne Room,” Melkor grunted by way of greeting, as the Vala’s frame appeared in the doorway, standing in an eerily similar position to the one Aulë had held ( _not_ Aulë, Sauron reminded himself) only a fortnight before.  
  
Sauron shot him a questioning look from his own position, tucked under six thick blankets upon his bed. His nose was still dribbly and his throat was sore – but he had come to the slow realisation over the last few days that he might just have made it through.  
  
The Vala continued, strutting through the doorframe as one would enter a hall full of servants, and surveyed Sauron’s position on the bed from down the line of his nose. “I was forced to relocate,” Melkor added. “Figured I would come make sure my Lieutenant had not indeed curled up somewhere and died, lest your traitorous fëa spill all of Angband’s secrets to a host of waiting Valar on the shores of Valinor.”  
  
Sauron rolled his eyes. He could not, personally, recall any word of imminent renovation to the Throne Room but decided not to press the issue, instead focusing on the most important subject at hand.  
  
“Oh,” Sauron replied. “Well yes it would seem, I suppose, that I have survived of the worst of the ordeal.”  
  
“Albeit narrowly.” He added, and inspected his nail to avoid pointing out that this was the first time the Vala had so much as thought to pay him a visit.  He did not care, anyway –  
  
“Hmm.” Melkor intoned, sweeping further into the room. “Well I hope you did not fear for Angband in your absence. If you _had_ been lost, I have Gothmog firmly lined up for the next promotion.”  
  
Sauron was not sure why – whether it was the lack of contact he’d had for near a fortnight or the exhaustion, or some combination of the two – but the hold he usually kept upon emotions concerning the Vala was weak, as a hot wave of humiliation washed through his bones. He felt the stem of traitorous tears prick at the corners of his vision, and quickly ducked his head.  
  
Melkor let out a rumbling laugh but Sauron did not respond, choosing instead to wind a stray string of fabric from the bedcovers around the sudden tremble of his fingers.  
  
There was a patter of feet from behind the Vala’s thick footsteps, and Sauron tilted up his head. He knew that scent –  
  
“Draugluin?” The Maia slurred, feeling now rather bewildered as the head of his favourite wolf popped up over the edging of his bed to nudge cautiously at his left hand. “What are you doing here?”  
  
He brightened somewhat, turning to glance at Melkor with a question in his eyes.  
  
The Vala tossed his raven black hair over his shoulder, and turned to glower at the beast. “Don’t ask me. He was causing havoc down in the pits these last few days with whines that sound remarkably similar to yours. The handlers have had enough.” The Vala ground: “Personally, I had half a mind to kill the beast – but Gothmog suggested we let him loose on you and lock him up here instead.”  
  
Sauron let out a mumble of acknowledgement.  In truth, though, he was only half-listening, as with a tired grin he stretched over the side of the bed to make eye contact with the wolf, and patted at the bedcovers.  
  
“Do you want to come up?” Sauron asked in a disturbing, raspy sing-song voice that almost made Melkor’s ears bleed.  
  
“That’s unhygienic, don’t you think.” The Vala pointed out, in spite of his own long history of less-than-hygienic behaviour, as the wolf jumped up upon the bed.   
  
Sauron ignored the jibe, reaching forward to scratch Draugluin’s ears.  Draugluin snuggled into the bedcovers between his knees, and the Maia had to admit – though to himself alone – that the company was very much welcome.  
  
There was silence for a moment so quiet that Mairon half-expected that the Vala had turned and left – but when he next looked up he found Melkor shifting his way past the end of Sauron’s bed.  
  
“Move over,” Melkor grunted.  
  
“What?”  
  
“Move over.” The Vala repeated, already in the process of pushing Mairon across the silken sheets to minimal resistance.  “You do not suppose that I am just going to sit over there, do you?” Melkor pointed in the direction of Sauron’s desk, and the wooden chair that sat beneath it. “That is hardly befitting for a Vala, nor comfortable.”  
  
“No.” Mairon argued, though with less vehemence than perhaps he should have: “You will get sick – and then you’ll _die_.”  
  
Melkor scoffed, though there was a faint trace of humour sketched across his face – and if Mairon did not know better, he would have suspected that the Vala had _missed_ him.  Maybe. Just a bit.  
  
As it was, he shifted further across, allowing more room for Melkor to slip into the bed by his side.  
  
The brush of a thick hand – ever cold, but Mairon was used to it now – grazed across his torso, as Melkor twisted to make himself comfortable across the pillows.  
  
Draugluin’s head nuzzled into his knees, and Mairon wondered if maybe he had spiked a fever again as an equally thick arm slipped behind his neck to splay across his shoulders.  
  
Mairon wormed his way into the blankets, not stupid enough to complain – but that was when he noticed it. As he ran his hand down the Vala’s stomach to get comfortable, his hand knocked across a rather too-prominent bulge.  
  
“Hm.” Melkor grunted, lightly, at the slip.  
  
Sauron paused, and frowned.  
  
“What, are you … wanting a blowjob?” He asked, peering up at Melkor between slitted eyes, all of a sudden suspicious.  
  
“… Well, while you’re down there …” Melkor started.  
  
“Pah!” Sauron spat, his eyes flying open, a faint pink discolouration blotching across his cheeks. “I _knew_ it!”  
  
_Unbelievable._    
  
And here he was – _sick_ – … **_dying_** – and –  
  
And –  
  
Melkor shrugged. “What?  You know what you signed up for when you betrayed your old Master … Consider it penance.” The Vala grinned; patting at his lap much in the same way Mairon had done to Draugluin only minutes before.  
  
“I cannot even believe this!” Mairon raged. “I nearly _died_ , and here you are – here you are visiting me for a blowjob!”  
  
“You had a cold.” Melkor deadpanned. “Don’t know how – the healers cannot seem to explain – but no matter. That is all it was.”  
  
“I had a _near-death experience_.” Sauron corrected, still mad, and squashed his face into Melkor’s thigh. “You will never understand.”  
  
“Never.”  
  
And for once, at least, they were agreed.


End file.
